Another game-changing development is new technology. Back in 2010 we hadn’t yet woken up to the full implications of social media. We didn’t realise just how much the tech companies knew about us. A lot of people weren’t even using smartphones yet. In 2020, we still don’t know the whole story, but we’ve come to accept a significant degree of electronic surveillance in our everyday lives. Thus the idea of being easily identified doesn’t seem so foreign anymore, not when we’re identified every time we go online to shop, socialise and express our opinions.
Of course, the information flows that would be enabled through ID cards would be controlled by the state — and the state, unlike Facebook or Google, has the power to arrest and imprison you. So, the stakes are higher. But, then again, if the authorities want to track your movements and behaviour, they already can.
The last ten years have seen rapid advances across a variety of surveillance technologies, including facial recognition, gait recognition, and even heartbeat recognition. The CCTV network is ever expanding in scope and sophistication and is supplemented by drones and other mobile forms of image capture. And that’s just one form of big data collected by the various arms of the state.
In short, if you’re leading any sort of normal life, the authorities don’t need you to carry around an ID card in order to identify you.
Indeed, the bigger risk may lie in not being identified. This was demonstrated by the Windrush Scandal — in which people who had immigrated to this country from the Caribbean were required to prove to the authorities that they’d been legally resident in the UK. For the Windrush generation who arrived before legal immigration was documented in the way it is now, this was difficult to do. Shamefully, longstanding UK residents were deported because they were unable to assemble the documentary evidence that wasn’t there — or, at least, wasn’t accessible. The scandal was in fact two scandals: first and foremost the inhumanity of plunging innocent people into a Kafkaesque nightmare; but also that it should be so hard to prove the basic facts of your own life.
A future full of big data will be a hyper-bureaucratic future. In our dealings with both the state and private corporations it is, therefore, vital that we have some consistent hold over the way our identities are recorded and recognised. ID cards could provide that control — a key that grants us access to what we need to know and what we want others to know about us. There’s no guarantee that the introduction of such a system would guarantee our rights, but it would be an opportunity to fight for them.
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We also need to think about the people who slip through the cracks of the system — living undocumented, unofficial lives unsupported and unprotected by the authorities. Only a small minority of these will be citizens who freely choose an ‘off-grid’ existence — a choice that should be respected. The great majority, though, will be vulnerable adults and children, many of them illegal immigrants, some of them trafficked against their will — and all of them at risk of exploitation. A recent report from the Centre for Social Justice estimates that there may be 100,000 or more victims of modern slavery in Britain alone.
We make things easy for this vile trade by tolerating, even celebrating, a bargain basement labour market — the legal and illegal components of which shade into one another. This is further enabled by a context in which it’s still possible for people to live and work without needing to prove who they are — and without their employers and landlords having to confirm those identities. A robust ID card system that made this simple and straightforward — but also inescapable — would be a severe blow to the modern slavers, people smugglers, slum landlords and other exploiters who depend on the anonymity of those they exploit.
Of course, no such system can be foolproof, nor would it be completely free of inconvenience for law abiding citizens. However, the same can be said of our passports system. Ultimately, it is a question of comparing these potential harms against the consequences of the status quo — in which we’re neither able to fully control our borders nor to prevent the everyday violation of basic human rights.
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What about the practical arrangements? One of the reasons why there was such resistance to New Labour’s ID cards policy was the lack of confidence in the government’s ability to manage IT projects. Indeed, the decade was marked by a series of fiascos — including one occasion when two CDs containing confidential child benefit data on 25 million people got lost in the post. Yes, really. The ensuing outrage was probably what doomed the ID policy before it was even implemented.
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